THE VALUE OF EXPRESSION- this is an A+ paper. It deserves your worship. ;)- this is another wink to let you know I'm kidding- you should worship the writer. (notice the lack of winky face)
Rocking back and forth on my feet I looked into the dark black box that housed a vibrant, messy sketch, illuminated by yellow lights and camera flashes. Its brown paper was dismally unprofessional, cut near the middle and taped together with poor accuracy. The soft shapes of a woman’s body were etched into the paper with the harshest of black lines; its width putting a dark halo around her figure. A towel was twirled on top of her head and a bath tub sat in the bottom right corner as a block of grey dust. Inside the protective box, where no harsh light could fade toxic chalk pastels, the sketch sat, admired not for its looks, but the shiny golden plaque that was nailed beside it. The plaque read, “Edgar Degas- French 1834-1917.”
As an artist myself, I’m often surprised and perturbed when crude sketches are shown in museums; the technique is quickened, the strokes are messy, and the effect is for study and not presentation. Many artists, Degas included, would be horrified to find their garish, preliminary drawings shown to the public. These doodles were meant to be a personal diary; when they are hung in a dark black box, so much can be misunderstood. After seeing the piece, I asked the curator why they’d hung it; it felt so wrong among the other pieces that were modern and complete. With an honest shrug she said, “If you have a Degas, you hang it.”
It became clear that it didn’t matter how the painting looked; it was by a famous artist and was therefore worth more than the greatest piece a high school student, like me, could ever produce. The value of paintings comes not from the quality, but the fame of the artists themselves. From this truth comes the hierarchy of the art world: the dead and famous, the advertisers, the start-ups, and the dreamers.
The dead and famous, like Degas, sell paintings in the millions. It’s not because of beauty or technique, but the signature at the bottom right of the canvas. The most expensive painting ever sold is Jackson Pollock’s No.5, 1948, which was bought for 140 million dollars. It’s the classic brown and yellow dribbles of paint that characterize most of Pollock’s work, and its worth is highly controversial. The piece is made from house paint and fiberboard, two very inexpensive materials; the paint is flicked over the work which requires no talent but a twitch of the wrist. The price doesn’t come from technique or material, but the name Pollock. He has been established in the art world so every scrap that he has ever painted and dribbled on has worth.
While the artists who are pushing up daisies live on in their past glory, people today are still trying to make a living with art and succeeding. It’s the Andy Warhols and Jeff Koons of the world who have adopted the artistic trends of the twenty-first century; the trends being commercialized art and marketing. An example of this is the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami; he had a gallery exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, and in the last galleria was a Louis Vuitton store decked with the purses Murakami designed. The artists of today are radically different than the artists of old because they have a sole monetary purpose. They make what will sell rather than an expression of themselves; some of these commercial artists are called ‘sell outs’ and ‘corrupted by business’ because they are slaves to making a profit.
Then again, all artists are chained to the sad fact that the artistic life is expensive. Paint and canvas are far from cheap, which is unfortunate because start-ups are traditionally broke. It takes some begging and pleading to get your name onto any art scene regardless of talent; this is mainly due to the immense number of artists and galleries per city. In Chelsea, at the base of Manhattan, there are more than three-hundred galleries, all of them fighting to stay alive. This many artists in such close proximity create a pandemic of market value over artistic quality. The young start-ups are desperate to make a living, and staying true to one’s original expression is nearly impossible. An art teacher once told me, “You either make stuff you love, or you make stuff you hate but are able to sell,” and that is a conflict which has been eating at the minds of artists long before Pollock and Degas.
Even in the harsh lights of school art rooms, the dreamers and amateur artists are often not driven by their own expressive capability, but their capability to get an ‘A’. Rather than doing what we feel is artistically acceptable, we will bend to the teacher’s aesthetic. It’s difficult to stand by one’s own artistic voice; I become attached to my projects and it hurts when my pride and joy is criticized. Often, I question my talent and wonder if my piece, the work of a high school student, is worth anything at all; I’m not dead or famous, so I have no reason to think that my imagination could come up with a respectable piece of art. Yet, it is still important for me and other dreamers to rest on our own intuition because anything other than our selves is contrived and false.
This raises the question, what is art without personal expression? What we fail to realize in this day in age is that Pollock was an original because he followed his own intuition. The value of his work comes from a name, but a name that is unwavering in what it stands for. The men and women who are millionaires in their graves became so because they painted from the soul rather than the wallet; this is why Warhol and Murakami will never be worth 140 million dollars. It doesn’t matter that Degas’ sketch made the woman out to be a ghoul or that it was aged and torn; what matters is that he didn’t let other people effect the story, subject, and emotion he wanted to convey. Art is self expression; without that it’s just paint on a canvas.
In the past week I have done some studying up on ancient art work. It was mainly spurred by an earlier post; a TED talk about the origins of beauty which sounded really weired and suggested that all humans love tear drop shapes...but out of that logic chaos I have found a new area of interest- prehistoric art. Specifically, I've been enamored with Venus Figurines; a group of depictions of the female body that are estimated to have been made around 20,000-40,000 B.C.E. These figures have enlarged secondary sexual characteristics like breasts, thighs, and hips, but usually small and undefined heads if any head at all. The sculptures are found all across Europe. The oldest known Venus was found in Germany and one of the newer ones in France, but the status are found as far east as Siberia. The Venus' are made out of a variety of materials including ceramic, mammoth ivory, serpentine rock, limestone, and black jet. Supposedly, they represent fertility and mother figures; it's been suggested that some of the figurines are pregnant mothers.
